Saturday, December 29, 2007

At least I do have some fans out there

I got some messages on YouTube from a guy called MarsDarinder who said he liked the way I wrote and animated The Writer's Nightmare. He wanted to do an interview for his web page, so I said that would be cool and if he liked what I did on YouTube then he should buy the DVD when I get it up on CreateSpace.

So hopefully I'll have at least 1 sale of the DVD and it's good PR to help build a word of mouth viral buzz for for the story. Also it's good to get feedback from someone who shows an interest to help improve it. It shows the degree of how much I was able to convey and what parts I still need to work on to be able to communicate the story effectively.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Would you like to do an interview?

Would you like to do an interview? I am a huge fan of The Writers Nightmare and would love to ask you a few questions for my website

Thanks for you time and I can't wait for your next fantastic project!

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Would you like to do an interview?

That sounds very cool, I'm putting the whole story on a DVD if you want to get one of those. The next project I was planning was continuing "An Angel's Destiny"

Let me know when you want to set up the interview

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Interview

Thanks so much for doing this interview Argon.

Q#1 Episode 9 and 10 have to be the most memorable part of the series for me. I love the song selection, how the words match the lyrics and of course Peter fighting pan is amazing. What inspired the battle?

Q#2 could you elaborate on the Dream Police?

Q#3 Whats the Gyrotwister?

Q#4 Can you summarize the overall story?

Q#5 It's sad to watch the story end but I'm excited that you mentioned in a previous e-mail that your continuing "An Angels Destiny" is there any details you can clue me into ahead of time about that?

P.S. I am interested in ordering a dvd but I'm broke right now so I will get back to you later about that:)

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Interview

Q1: The musical theme started in Episode 8 with the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Fly on a Windshield then continued in 9 and 10 with The Carpet Crawlers and The Chanber of 32 Doors from the rock opera by Genesis since the whole album was about illusions on the way to enlightement and I wanted Pan to do something symphonic that Peter and Cyan would eventually be able to recognize to break free of the illusions.

The battle with Pan was inspired by a conversation I had with someone back in the 80's about a book by Jack Chalker called Demons of the Dancing Gods that had a similar kind of thing that I wanted Pan and Peter to go through to show Peter could recognize that on the Astral Plane the rules about matter and energy were different.

Q2: I got the name for the Dream Police from the Cheap Trick song and they are the interogators for the Illuminati. They do more high tech torture by using a brain probe device to scan your dreams and obtain the info they need. That's why Peter and Cyan had to take their minds away from their bodies to avoid it.

Q3: I didn't go into much detail about the Gyrotwister in this book because it was a sequel to my other called "Memoirs from Sideways in Time" but briefly it's a time/space machine that also can go across parallel worldlines. It's a whole better than the flux capacitor they used in Back to the to the Future (especially as you saw it didn't keep running into things like in that movie) for more details on the Gyrotwister and to get a copy of Memoirs you can go to the download links for the plot summary and the other novel on my blog

Q4: Basically it's a story about how who is writing the story is relative to where you are. Steve Nelson writes about Joe, Luke and P.L.A.N. in one worldline and I about about Steve Nelson in another. Someone writes about me in a different timeline sort of like that movie Stranger than Fiction. Steve finds this out when Peter and Cyan drag him into a rescue adventure.

Q5: I have 6 episodes of An Angels Destiny on YouTube right now but I did it a bit differently since I had the animation and music here but I had the animation with the text on Revver and I had a Flash page with just the text of the novel and both videos on it but I lost the sever space the web page was on so now I only have the 2 kinds of videos online until I can get some more web space.

I was at the part where Minerva and Chris having failed to get in touch with Odin at the Norse Temple go to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to relax and Chris finds out that Minerva still has the power of her halo, all she has to do is focus and find other ways to tap into it.

P.S. You still have time before the DVD is available since I still have to mail it in and get it proofed. Hopefully it'll be ready to order from Amazon.com and CreateSpace in a couple of weeks. I just wanted to give you a heads up that you would be able to get it on DVD soon.

I did want to ask you about the comic text format, since I've had others that said it was hard to follow the story reading them like that. How much difficulty did you have with that part?

I wanted to do it with voice over but I couldn't get enough people together to record all the different parts so I was kinda forced to do it that way.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Text format

I think it works really well. It goes by a little faster than i usually read, yet the characters still have so much personality and overall I liked the pacing a lot. It's definitely one of if not the best computer animated movies ever made certainly the best written.

I've watched the whole thing twice now and plan to watch it again soon, I also watched that episode of An Angels Destiny you attached to your last e-mail and the terrain and character art is excellent plus i saw the revver.com link cool stuff.


To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Text format

You said it was a litle faster than you can read, would it be easier to just pause the video so you can read it? I could lengthen the time the text stays on the screen but would that ruin the pacing?

Would it help if I had the YouTube version to show flow of the action and the music, the Revver version to show how the text relates to the action and the full text of the novel to show the details and the emotions that covered all the bases together?
I put all 3 in a blog so you can see it all in one place together

Let me know if that makes the story easier to follow and if it gives more depth and dimension to it. Thanks for all your compliments and I really appreciate your feedback so I can improve it.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Pacing

I did pause the video at times and even re-watched a couple of the deeper plot points to understand them better. Maybe just another couple more seconds on the longer paragraphs here and there would help.

For An Angels Destiny I think they should all have text, maybe simplify the text for YouTube and tone down anything in the text you think you might get flagged over.

And it's cool that you have the longer version of the text on blogspot I'm gonna read those tomorrow and re-watch the episodes to get a better idea of the story. No problem I'm happy to help

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: Re: Pacing

Well how about breaking the longer paragraphs into more than one text balloon so it would be easier to read, would that help? That might be less strain on the pacing

How did you find the idea of a computer with a surfer dude accent? Did S.T.A.R. provide some good comic relief with his use of the improbability generator? (Did you recognize the hisory of the device?)

Did you understand the concepts and principles that the Gamemaster was trying to put across? Did I convey the ideas for the Grande Game well enough to be grasped?

In Angel's Destiny, I'm sort of going from the other end instead of lower to higher, it's from Higher to Lower but both show the evolution through stages of consciousness.


From: MarsDarinder
Subject: The grande game

Yeah smaller text balloons would help. I loved the surfer accent very original idea too. S.T.A.R. did make me laugh with the improbability generator but I don't know the history behind it, what would that be?

I think I do. The gamemaster was saying that karma is like a video game where your scored at the end based on your choices. The Omniverse split in two because of the choices people made to be un-enlightened. Is that about right?


To: MarsDarinder
Subject: The next part of the story

I really liked the post of the interview you did on your blog, thanks a lot for the exposure and all the feedback you've given me.

I'm having a bit more of a delay with the DVD than I thought, since when I mailed it in to CreateSpace it didn't get delivered until the day before Xmas and they've been very slow picking up the slack from the holidays, hopefully they'll mail me the proof copy to be approved next week and it'll be ready for you to buy then.

I did get the next part of the story for "An Angel's Destiny" up on YouTube and the full text on my blog. Let me know what you think of it.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Thanks

Thanks for making The Writer's Nightmare i look forward to the dvd release!
I hope you make a ton of money off of your art and even if you don't i'm still glad you had the inspiration and followed through with the hard work needed to pull off something so great.

I've watched Angel's Destiny a few times and read the text story too I love it very cool stuff.

P.S. deleted you last e-mail by accident before i got a chance to finish reading it so if I didn't cover anything please let me know!

To: MarsDarinder
Subject: RE: Thanks

Did you get the part where I added some new stuff to Angel's Destiny?I took your advice and added to the time the text stays on the screen, let me know if it's easier to read.
I put the full text to the new part on my blog also I'm working on the next part where Chris shows Minerva how to use new ways to tap into her powers and she get in contact with Odin.

From: MarsDarinder
Subject: Angel's Destiny

It's definitely easier to read and the blogspot.com text always helps flesh out the plot. It's the best part of the story so far. Very cool!

Friday, December 21, 2007

The tremendous odds of fulfilling the epic of the Impossible Dream

I had been thinking that I actually could finish the second book they way I planned, since the tragedy of the failure of the love story would be balanced out by the accomplishment of finishing the Naked Angel Presentation.

That leaves room for the big finish in the last book of the trilogy, since when I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End I was amazed at all the plot twists and how it kept building the action bigger and bigger until it was finally all resolved. Not in the way it was expected but also leaving room for a fourth movie.



The trouble with ending the 2nd book that way is that it would most likely demand a more involved task in the 3rd book. Since I had already had the experience of a normal relationship, it would set the bar for an extraordinary one. The odds of pulling that off of is worse than winning the lottery in each the state in the same year.


It would be the true essence of the Impossible Dream, since even the ones I've heard that accomplished great relationships, haven't been able to sustain them. Richard Bach got divorced from Leslie Parrish so did Billy Joel from Christie Brinkley. Even Ken Wilber was only with Treya a year before she died.

Part of the trouble is a lot of women are confused about what they do want, that's what the cliche "Nice guys finish last" applies to since a lot of biology makes the mistake of strength confused for stability. Since strength is no substitute for maturity in the long run it is hard to maintain. There was an example of that in the movie Bedazzled when Elliot wished to be more "sensitive" because it was what Allison thought she wanted.



Admittedly the example was exaggerated for dramatic effect since Elliot was so overly sensitive that no gal would want that and the strong guy was almost dragging his knuckles on the beach like a caveman so that would be hard to take also. But the principle is sound and it's a paradox that will decrease the odds of a relationship surviving.

Most likely what it would take to accomplish that Impossible Dream would be to integrate those paradoxes so that they are all included and not seen as separate parts in different people. The trouble with that is it would require both people to realize all the stages in all four quadrants.



The only way to do that is like Ken Wilber was talking about being a Bodhisattva in Hell, you have to be ultimately enlightened then come back to relate and help others to be enlightened also. As I was saying the highest scores of the Grande Game are for those that aren't stuck at any stage of consciousness, but can move through any of them at will.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

I just wish I had a better ending than a tragedy

But I guess not every story has a happy ever after. It's a shame since I used to believe in Fairytale endings and that's the way I had the first book in my auto-biography "Seeking Resonance" end with my finding a soulmate to marry. I had thought that Krys did believe in romantic endings also, she said she did, but I guess that couldn't last since it's very hard to live up to that kind of thing over the long haul.



I was going to do the second book more about the adventures we had, but it seems like more of a tragedy like the movie "Shakespeare in Love" where he has to lose her and write about her after. But even Richard Bach couldn't seem to sustain his relationship at the soulmate level after he wrote One which is what I wanted to emulate in the 2nd book



We both loved that movie, but she never believed me when she worried about things working out and I used to tell her that "It all ends well" since I guess the answer "I don't know, it's a mystery" wasn't enough for her. I suppose that's a lot more dramatic than I had planned but as they say "artists have to suffer to create great art" and the situation does lend itself better to be able to "write her well."

The thing is, it does depend somewhat on what side of the screen, you're on. If you're the one at the keyboard developing the plot for the characters to deal with or if you're like in the movie "Stranger than Fiction" where someone else is creating the plot for you to follow.



Some of it is circumstances beyond your control since you can't make choices for other people and I've been wondering if this is the 2nd part of a trilogy though.



I always figured that the attitude of "That's all Life is, is a series of down endings" was a bit shortsighted, since even if Empire Strikes Back did end with tragedies, it was only the middle of the story and the climax was still to come. Maybe that's the moral here that it's not over yet, I might be eligible for the Fickle Finger of Fate award now but there is still more of the story to be written, just that Krys won't be in it.

As John Lennon used to sing "Instant Karma's gonna get you, gonna knock you off your feet" the lies Krys told are going to come back and bite her in the ass. I found out the depth of her lies to me from reading some of her messages on Yahoo to Farin.

Then I made sure that Farin knows about what she was trying to hide from him since I thought it only fair that he had more of the facts so he could make a informed decision instead of being kept in the dark.

I doubt she'll get away with her betrayal of trust because from the conversation I had with him, he's not going to be able to put any trust in her since he won't know if she's capable of being sincere or how long it will be before she finds someone else and does the same thing to him.

Even if she was able to convince him otherwise when she got there, and they do live together for a while, the reality of day to day living will most likely take it's toll since the odds that she has let go of her false expectations and neediness are slim.

The demands of his job as a chef and having to be gone for long periods of time is not going to be able to keep up with her demands for attention. That and the rift created by his need to have children and her inability to be responsible for them are also going to drive them apart.



So it might be that when she is faced with the regrets of her actions, it'll be like I told her that she'll be like in the movie "Chasing Amy" after we've moved on and she'll have to live with the loss of what she had. That might finally give her some maturity instead of all the selfish behavior from being an only child.



I did warn her when she started getting involved with Farin that it was unavoidable that one or all of the three of us were going to get hurt and the odds of winning her "Lets make a Deal" with Fate had very poor odds.



But she maintained "I gamble with my life, never my money" so it was her choice to reap what she sowed, that's the essence of the tragedy it seems.

I have been thinking that it's not worth getting involved with someone else again since I'd probably never get closer to a soulmate again. As they say "Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone." and that she was the only thing that gave my life meaning.



But thinking about the second part of a trilogy does give me hope and I'd hate to leave the story unfinished especially since I saw Karen Effiel agonize over the ending she made for Harold Crick so that she changed it. Also when I think of how it inspired Shakespeare to greatness.

After all I didn't end "Seeking Resonance" when Margy died since that wasn't the place I wanted to stop. I waited for a way to go out and found it was when Krys and I got married. So this next book might be less like "One" than I had planned, but I should still wait and work toward an ending I like better.

Hopefully I'll learn more and be more careful to do a better job so the adventure and the romance of the fairytale can be sustained in the 3rd book of the trilogy.